> £4,000pcm nursery fees

[MidnightPatrol]

For those of you paying this, how bad is it? How do you cope?

I am hoping to have a second baby but it’s going to cost ~£4,200pcm (ignoring any future fee increases…!) in childcare for a year or two.

Slightly terrifying, particularly in context of higher interest rates / higher cost of servicing a mortgage when I come off my low interest deal next year.

This is what we did - pulling DS1 out of nursery for the year I was on maternity.
The year they were both FT nursery was tough, but then got cheaper by the year.

Can you both condense your hours and take alternate Mondays off? That will save you a day

On a live-in nanny / au pair to do wraparound - brilliant in principle, but we don't have a spare room.

And we don't seem to have any childminders locally - I suspect due to the high cost of housing.

Similar situation, OP. I’m 35 with a kid in nursery already. Childcare is cheaper in my area, but wages are lower as well. We’ve only just managed the last couple of years through overtime and working a second job. We can’t afford another set of childcare fees, and neither of us earn enough for the other to stay home. The only option for us at the moment is to not have another kid (yet). That may change in a year or so when we aren’t paying for the first child (and I don’t have exams looming) but I don’t want to have a baby after 35 either, so it’s unlikely.

Is it worth you both getting under the £100k threshold?
If you haven't already, create a spreadsheet with the cost comparisons of getting both of you under £100k (and then having the childcare boost) vs being over £100k.

It may not help, but if you haven't already done the actual comparison you could be surprised by how much difference it makes.

30 hours free is 1140 hours across the year and can be free or subsidised depending on how your local childcare provider does it. As a minimum, it's likely to be worth £5.5k per child + the £2k you get from tax-free top-up.

So getting you both under £100k would be worth a minimum of £15k in childcare fees (£7.5k per full-time child), but likely more than that. I think when we worked it out we'd need to earn something like an extra £24k between us before balancing out the loss of tax-free childcare, funded hours and personal tax allowance. And only after that barrier did we increase our take-home pay.

So if you both salary sacrifice into your pensions you might find you:

• Are better off financially
• Increasing your pensions more
• Save on needing to do the tax return for the personal allowance

Our next lever is to drop to 9 out of 10 days but if you don't feel comfortable dropping hours, you could always look into OPL (Ordinary parenting leave) to bring you under the £100k threshold. With the bonus that it's for childcare, so we're using it for family holidays, which frees up our annual leave for us to use for ourselves or for when we need a half day here or there to cover child-related things.

Do nanny’s look after children when they are poorly ?

Only one of the parents needs to earn £100k to not qualify.

OP what are yours and your partners earnings?

Women do not have "plenty of time" at 35 to have children. On what planet are all the posters who insist on this?

I would do a fertility MOT and then make a decision. I discovered at 34 that I had the ovarian reserve of a 45 year old so obviously in that situation you can’t wait. However if all is good then a bigger age gap isn’t the end of the world.

If you're in UK you'll het funded hours at 3.

I cannot believe how expensive childcare is in UK! I know salaries are also higher but I live in a different European country and paid 198 euro a month for my child to attend full time nursery ages 1-3 and that included lunches and mid morning snack!

Are you sure there is absolutely possibly of either you or your DH to reduce / change your working hours? If you take a years maternity leave there will only be a year or so after that of super high nursery fees, so could you both negotiate compressed hours over 4 days just for a year? Or temporarily go part time? Or even move jobs and negotiate more flexible hours with a new employer.

Could you go part time? If I worked full time, we wouldn't be eligible either. What's the point of working more to earn less?

Move to Northern Ireland and commute to London for work. Honestly, when my DS went to a childminder full time it was roughly £800 a month and that was from 7am to 6.00pm. We supplied food such as lunch and occasionally an easy dinner, childminder supplied snacks. She did school runs and during summer holidays did great days out with other childminders. You'd save a fortune!

Yes I was older than that when I had DC1 and still didn’t rush in to DC2!

I thought everyone was entitled to some free hours? I earn considerably more than £100k and still get the 15 hours a week.

The cost of childcare in the UK is scandalous however. It needs to be subsidised.

When the nanny is poorly? Unless they are really ill then yes, they tend to. We have a live-in nanny for around 6 years and I can only remember once where the nanny was too sick to look after the kids. But they usually have a wide network of nanny friends and they help each other out so my kids were looked after by another nanny for the week along with her own “nanny kids”.

That said, our nannies always became part of the family so would often go above and beyond for us as they loved our children. Not sure this is the same for all nannies though.

ExH earned less than me but funnily enough there was never a question of him giving up his job when our DC were little... Instead, I returned to work part-time and that just about covered the nursery fees. It’s only for a few years so think of it as an investment in your career (vs giving up your job and being financially dependent on someone who may or may not turn out to be unreliable/controlling/abusive). If you can manage it, release some equity to tide you over those few years.

The many of us who have had all our children later than that?

Move out of London and commute.

Nursery is £65 a day here and an hour to London by train. Even allowing for commuting costs it’s significantly cheaper especially with cheaper housing.

FML.

Really?
The biscuit's been taken so have this cookie, instead🍪

Cant believe how many people on this post are criticizing OP choices. She did not ask what should she do, she asked how anyone in a similar situation was managing.

My calculations include an assumed 15 hours at age 3.

£2,300 less 15 free hours = £1,840.

Plus £2,300 for the younger one = £4,140 total.

I wonder if the paid for hours are going to get more expensive to help subsidise the 'funded' hours, given the funding apparently doesn't actually cover the cost.

Plenty of women have children in their late-30s and into their 40s.

It’s already been suggested several times that OP gets a fertility test because it varies by woman.

Some women conceive easily in their 40s and others are infertile in their 20s.

They won't be the same cost though. The older one (who's getting the free hours) will be cheaper than the younger one surely? I realise that this is not a helpful fact.